‘Greetings Esteemed Professor, your paper has already been accepted for the 23rd Quadrennial International Conference on Microfluidics in The International Hilton Towers Conference Centre, Dubai. Your paper is also guaranteed publication after peer review in a special issue of the prestigious International General Journal of Scientific Modern Microfluidics (Impact Factor 25) and will be published open access online within one week of submission’

Sounds too good to be true… it certainly is. These emails are the work of predatory publishers who run bogus journals and bogus conferences. Clearly, in the above case they missed their mark by a long way but sometimes an email comes which is in your own field. The fact that some of my colleagues and students ask me if it is worth submitting to these shows that not everyone understands the dangers. These predators work exclusively in the online open access environment and have ridden on the back of the legitimate open access publishing industry.

What do the predators want?

They want your money. The above conference invitation (factional) will have a hyperlink at the foot ‘Registration’ where you can part with the money required to attend, be accommodated and have your paper published. All you have to do is book the airfare. The problem is that when you arrive at your destination, all you may find are a few other bewildered academics who have been similarly conned – you will have no hotel booking and the conference will not exist. You, or your university have lost money and if the paper is published you have lost copyright and no other publisher will accept your work. You have wasted a publication which will not be returnable in REF and which will not enhance your CV.

What were the signs you should have spotted? Almost any email beginning with ‘greetings’ and ‘esteemed’ is predatory. If ‘guaranteed publication’ and ‘peer review’ appear in the same sentence, avoid at all costs; this is definitely predatory. Otherwise, bona fide conferences tend not tout for business and there are a limited number of prestigious conferences in any field. Check the email and links carefully. Often hyperlinks to the ‘Prestigious Scientific Committee’ and the ‘Prestigious Editorial Committee’ lead to nothing. If they do lead to a list of names – do you know any of them? If you do, then email them. These predators are not beyond using names without permission.

Avoid

Clearly you must avoid sending your work to predatory publishers and sending money to predatory publisher conferences. There are common sense ways to do this by running some of the checks I outline above. With journals, you can easily check that the publisher is reputable. If an impact factor is claimed, check via Thomson Reuters or Web of Science. There is a very sensitive, possibly over-inclusive, list of predatory publishers and predatory journals known as Beall’s list. A complementary way to check journals is the Directory of Open Access Journals. You can also listen to my podcast on the topic of predatory publishers and journal hi-jackers.

Roger Watson PhD RN FRCP Edin FRCN FAAN

Professor of Nursing, University of Hull, UK

Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Advanced Nursing

Editor, Nursing Open

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/oa-in-action-the-plague-of-predatory-publishers/feed/0researchservicesnewsOA in Action: Open Access and Ethics by Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagorhttps://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/oa-in-action-open-access-and-ethics-by-professor-raphael-cohen-almagor/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/oa-in-action-open-access-and-ethics-by-professor-raphael-cohen-almagor/#respondWed, 26 Oct 2016 10:57:45 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=77]]>Our third Open Access Week blog delves into the ethics of open access and the benefits to wider communities, as well as to the author. It is written by Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor (@almagor35 on twitter).

The idea behind open access is a noble one. We at the University of Hull are fortunate to be part of the prosperous Western world. We live and work in a scholarly country. We are privileged to have access to many resources that our wonderful library has. However, not all scholars are as fortunate as we are. They do not have state-of-the-art libraries. Sometimes they do not have any library at all. Open access utilizes this age of globalization and Internet to connect between the privileged and the less privileged. Wealth of information that otherwise is denied to some parts of the world becomes available. Scholars and other interested people in Africa, South America, Asia as well as in developing countries in other continents are able to read online valuable information without paying prohibitive subscription fees and without violating copyrights laws. Open access helps to increase knowledge and to decrease inequality; it enriches people and cultures and broadens the community of knowledgeable scholars. Open access is a tool of empowerment and communication: it creates bridges and brings scholars together.

Open access is also good for those who publish because the products of their research is now been read by many more people, not only those who have access to the journals. The impact factor of open access publications is far more significant. Furthermore, often open access publications are published relatively quickly. Some open access platforms (not journals) allow instant publication while others publish articles within a few days.

Here are some figures from my personal experience: My publications reached 14,000 reads on the ResearchGate platform that enables self-publication. My articles were downloaded 7,689 times via another platform called SSRN that hosts some 320,000 authors who self-publish their scholarship for the benefit of all. One of my articles, “The Right to Die with Dignity: An Argument in Ethics and Law” received 11,761 views on the Academia platform.

However, with the growth of the open access movement the number of journals has been growing exponentially. In addition to the established publishers, new publishers have entered the market and they have flooded it with thousands of new journals of varied quality. I am getting at least one request a week to publish my articles in one of those journals. One has reason to suspect that many of these journals do not engage in scholarly activities but in fraud. Many of those bogus new journals have no intention to observe academic standards of peer review. Open access has facilitated scholarly prostitution. It is harming our profession.

Indeed, the vast majority of those publishers charge money for publishing with their low-esteemed journals but often they do not mention this small detail in their invitations. At present the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has charged a publisher of hundreds of academic journals with deceiving readers about reviewing practices, publication fees, and the nature of its editorial boards.[1]

The FTC’s complaint alleges that OMICS Group Inc., along with two affiliated companies claim that their journals follow rigorous peer-review practices and have editorial boards made up of prominent academics. In reality, many articles are published with little to no peer review and numerous individuals represented to be editors have not agreed to be affiliated with the journals.

According to the FTC’s complaint, OMICS does not tell researchers that they must pay significant publishing fees until after it has accepted an article for publication, and often will not allow researchers to withdraw their articles from submission, thereby making the research ineligible for publication in another journal. This legal precedent is an important milestone, one that hopefully signals the downfall of this unfortunate negative development of bogus journals that has evolved together with the positive and important open access movement.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/oa-in-action-open-access-and-ethics-by-professor-raphael-cohen-almagor/feed/0researchservicesnewsOA in Action: What has OA ever done for us? by Dr. Dave Lunthttps://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/oa-in-action-what-has-oa-ever-done-for-us-by-dr-dave-lunt/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/oa-in-action-what-has-oa-ever-done-for-us-by-dr-dave-lunt/#respondTue, 25 Oct 2016 11:25:21 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=66]]>Our second OA Week 2016 blogpost is by Dr. Dave Lunt (@davelunt on twitter) who looks at what OA has ever done for us – which should be read in the voice of John Cleese!

Open Access: What have the Romans ever done for us?

Those of you who are Monty Python fans will recognise the rhetorical question title, famously followed by a very long list. In that spirit I ask “What has Open Access ever done for us?” Well, there’s the easy access. I read the literature a lot, and even though we have library subscriptions it’s just so much easier to research a topic using fully OA journals. And then there’s the moral high ground. Publishing OA I can explain that I’m not supporting a multi-billion pound publishing industry based on tax-funded academics working for free and then paying with our taxes for their own outputs later on. And then there’s the citation advantage. Well obviously the citation advantage, the citations go without saying don’t they. It’s known that work published as OA gets cited much more, and read much more, it just has much more influence. And there’s the financial stability. Non-OA publishers raise their subscription fees at much more than the rate of inflation, it’s unsustainable for university libraries, and I like knowing that OA journals will give me access forever. Then there’s the open re-use. OA journals allow others to reuse figures and text in their own work. This means that your work can be built upon and incorporated into a new generation of scholarly works. There’s the easy compliance with funders’ requirements. Funding agencies are rightly requiring, as a condition of funding, that published outputs of their grants are not signed away to commercial publishers. OA publishing automatically meets these requirements. And there are the modern publisher technologies. OA publishers have shaken up the market in lots of ways including technologically. Manuscript publishing designed for the web, rather than just copied onto the web, has been driven largely by OA publishers such as PeerJ, eLife and PLOS. So, apart from the easy access, the moral position, the citation advantage, the financial stability, the open reuse, meeting the funders’ conditions, and the modern publishing technology, what has Open Access ever done for us?

Monty Python’s Life of Brian scene “What have the Romans ever done for us?” https://youtu.be/ExWfh6sGyso It’s interesting that the Pythons have allowed unrestricted posting (like Open Access) of Monty Python clips to YouTube, and their view is that this actually helps their business interests.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/oa-in-action-what-has-oa-ever-done-for-us-by-dr-dave-lunt/feed/0researchservicesnewsOA in action: Early Career Researchers by Dr Grant Abt and Dr Mark Fogartyhttps://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/oa-in-action-early-career-researchers-by-dr-grant-abt-and-dr-mark-fogarty/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/oa-in-action-early-career-researchers-by-dr-grant-abt-and-dr-mark-fogarty/#respondMon, 24 Oct 2016 12:04:19 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=50]]>Our first post is by Dr Grant Abt (@grantabt on Twitter) and Dr Mark Fogarty, who discuss the value of open access to research practice, with particular attention to how it affects early career researchers. They have produced this as a podcast which can be accessed at https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:13956. This is a lively discussion that covers the benefits of open access to research and some potential pitfalls, alongside solutions to those pitfalls.

Remember to follow the twitter hashtags #OAweek and #OAWeek2016 to discover other events.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/oa-in-action-early-career-researchers-by-dr-grant-abt-and-dr-mark-fogarty/feed/0researchservicesnewsOpen in action: OA Week 2016https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/open-in-action-oa-week-2016/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/open-in-action-oa-week-2016/#respondFri, 21 Oct 2016 15:46:59 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=39]]>October 24 – 30, 2016 is Open Access week. OA week is a global event, now in its 9th year, that is committed to promoting Open Access in research and scholarship. This year, the theme is Open in Action, which seeks to show how OA is being practiced. To celebrate this, here at the University of Hull we will be running a series of blogposts written by academic practitioners about their experience of open access, the benefits to them, academia and society, and some of the potential pitfalls and how to navigate them.

If you want to know more about the event, take a look at http://www.openaccessweek.org/ where they will be talking about what is happening around the world and follow the hashtags #OAweek and #OAWeek2016 on twitter to see what other practitioners are doing and talking about.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/open-in-action-oa-week-2016/feed/0researchservicesnewsThe next REF, HEFCE and Open Access publishing: guidance and eventshttps://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/the-next-ref-hefce-and-open-access-publishing-guidance-and-events/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/the-next-ref-hefce-and-open-access-publishing-guidance-and-events/#respondMon, 04 Apr 2016 14:37:19 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=25]]>The HEFCE policy for the next REF states that all university research outputs published in journals need to be open access to be eligible for the next REF. The local University policy ensures compliance with the HEFCE policy:
“All university research outputs published in journals must be deposited in Hydra, the institutional repository.”
Please send the author’s final version of your article and author’s acceptance email to repository@hull.ac.uk within 3 months of acceptance.
Further help and guidance is available from our online Open Access LibGuide at http://libguides.hull.ac.uk/openaccess.
For general REF related enquiries please contact Andrew Taylor, REF Manager, Research and Enterprise: A.F.Taylor@hull.ac.uk.

As part of Library and Learning Innovation’s promotion of this agenda, there will be an Open Access Panel event on 25th April 2016 at 2:15pm in Wilberforce LR20. The panel will be made up of researchers from the University of Hull who will share their experiences of Open Access publishing. The event is open to all university staff.
In addition, members of the new Research Services Team invite colleagues to attend the following open 1 hour meetings:
11:15, 05/04/16, Derwent SR4
12:15, 21/04/16, Wilberforce LR22
14:15, 27/04/16, Derwent SR1
14:15, 04/05/16, Wilberforce LR20
15:15, 09/05/16, BJL Teaching Room 6
11:15, 19/05/16, Wilberforce LR08
15:15, 25/05/16, Larkin 1FF
14:15, 31/05/16, Wilberforce LR20
Members of the team will also be running promotional activities at Hull campus catering outlets at lunchtimes throughout the forthcoming months.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/the-next-ref-hefce-and-open-access-publishing-guidance-and-events/feed/0researchservicesnewsResearch Professionalhttps://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/research-professional/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/research-professional/#respondThu, 17 Dec 2015 09:48:25 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=20]]>If you would like to keep up with news on policy developments around research from Parliament and the Research Councils as well as tailored news for the University of Hull, you could do no better than the Research Professional newsletter at https://www.researchprofessional.com/0/rr/home.]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/research-professional/feed/0researchservicesnewsOpen Access to Publications in Horizon 2020 2 December 2015https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/open-access-to-publications-in-horizon-2020-2-december-2015/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/open-access-to-publications-in-horizon-2020-2-december-2015/#respondThu, 26 Nov 2015 13:27:07 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=14]]>Here’s an opportunity to learn more about Open Access and Horizon 2020 being promoted by JISC:

FOSTER is running a course and webinar on Open Access to publications in Horizon 2020.

Compliance with the H2020 OA mandate by depositing publications in repositories

Reuse of deposited publications in Horizon2020

On 2 December a one hour webinar will be hosted, which will give course participants the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of the compliance issues, and get direct replies to their questions and doubts. To participate in the webinar, that will be hosted at http://www.instantpresenter.com/eifl125, all you will need is an internet-connected computer with sound (and maybe headphones if you are in a busy room). Registration for the webinar is not required; please join up to 15 minutes before starting time. For the course, please register here https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/user/register.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/11/26/open-access-to-publications-in-horizon-2020-2-december-2015/feed/0researchservicesnewsStaff development: Research Data Management, 12 November 2015, 9.15am-12noonhttps://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/staff-development-research-data-management-12-november-2015-9-15am-12noon/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/staff-development-research-data-management-12-november-2015-9-15am-12noon/#respondThu, 22 Oct 2015 15:57:19 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=12]]>Don’t miss the latest Research Data Management staff development event. You can sign up at http://www2.hull.ac.uk/administration/staffdevelopment/programme/academicdevelopment-workshop/researchdatamanagement.aspx and we have a description of the event below.

Many types of data are generated by research across many disciplines; technology now makes it easier for more data to be created by more people. Clear research data management provides the tools, processes and infrastructure to support the management of data, ensures that the data is maintained over time, and demonstrates good research practice and integrity.

This interactive session is aimed at all academic and postdoctoral staff engaged in research, who gather or generate data to support research analysis, such as documents, images, spreadsheets, databases, etc.

The session will:

discuss how different types of data can be managed throughout the research lifecycle, taking advantage of local, national and international services

describe and share good research data management practices and experience

explore how data can be published/shared to maximise its value

consider the issues of data preservation

meet funder requirements for data management

By the end of the event, participants will be able to:

understand how to take advantage of research data management support throughout the research lifecycle

appreciate how data publishing/sharing might be used to develop research practice

embed good research data management practice as required in local research

The session will allow time for discussions and for queries and issues to be raised.

]]>https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/staff-development-research-data-management-12-november-2015-9-15am-12noon/feed/0researchservicesnewsOpen Access Week, 19-23 October 2015, is here!https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/open-access-week-19-23-november-2015-is-here/
https://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/open-access-week-19-23-november-2015-is-here/#commentsMon, 19 Oct 2015 08:56:19 +0000http://researchservicesteamhull.wordpress.com/?p=9]]>This week the world of research celebrates the open access movement with the 8th annual open access week. The theme this year is Open for Collaboration and will look at how open access helps collaboration between researchers, organisations and more. Institutions, organisations and inidividuals around the world are putting together activities such as twitter chats, webinars and a wikipedia edit-a-thon. Details of major events can be found at http://www.openaccessweek.org/ and by following the hashtag #oaweek on twitter.